From the man who married her grandmother to the man who married her daughter, from working a room full of bar mitzvah guests on behalf of her husband’s political career to headlining major pro-Israel events during her own, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s journey has been suffused with Jewish connections.
That’s been a natural consequence of her East Coast education, her trajectory in the party favored by a substantial majority of Jewish Americans, and her embrace of the Jewish narrative of triumphing over adversity and bigotry, longtime friends of the 2016 presidential candidate say.
Sara Ehrman, whose friendship with the Democratic front-runner dates back more than four decades, noted that the Clintons, upon arriving in Arkansas in the mid-1970s, quickly established ties with leaders of the state’s tiny Jewish community.
“They were a smart, educated young couple … who had come down to this wonderful little city,” said Ehrman, now 96, referring to Little Rock. “The Jews gravitated to them. Among her best and most fervent supporters were Jews.”
The Clintons would attend seders at the homes of Jewish friends during their Little Rock years, and in 1988 Bill Clinton as governor co-officiated with Rabbi Zeke Palnick of Arkansas’ capital city at the Jewish wedding of Richard and Sheila Bronfman.
The Clintons are “both very spiritual and they tend to like to experience different cultures around them,” said Sheila Bronfman, who traveled the country to campaign for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and for Hillary Clinton in 2008.
In her first autobiography, “Living History,” Hillary Clinton recalls being 10 years old and noticing numbers tattooed on the arm of an acquaintance of her father’s. Hugh Rodham explained that Nazis had tattooed Jews, whom they murdered en masse.
“I knew that my grandmother Della’s [second] husband, Max Rosenberg, was Jewish, and I was horrified that someone like him could have been murdered just because of his religion,” Clinton wrote in 2003.
By the time Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, the youthful governor and his wife had become favorites among Jewish Democrats. Ehrman described a presidential campaign headquarters buzzing with Jewish activists. “The Jews loved the Clintons so much, they were coming from around the country,” she said. “If they couldn’t come, they would send food. The whole staff would end up in the Jewish room because there were bagels from New York, Danish pastries, Goldenberg’s peanut chews.” (The “Jewish room” she describes refers to the area where Jewish activists would congregate.)
The Jewish sensibility permeated the Clinton White House, where the first couple inaugurated what is now an annual Hanukkah party in 1993, in part because of the abundance of Jewish staffers: there was communications chief Ann Lewis; senior adviser Rahm Emanuel; Jack Lew, special assistant to President Clinton who would go on to become Treasury secretary under President Barack Obama; and Ron Klain, now Obama’s Ebola czar.
Hillary Clinton’s eight years in the Senate representing New York strengthened the couple’s ties to national Jewish groups. Her pro-Israel advocacy included exposing incitement in Palestinian media and helping to win full membership for Magen David Adom in the International Committee of the Red Cross. She blamed the Palestinians, and not the Israelis, for the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace talks and the subsequent second intifada.
After winning the Senate seat in 2000, Clinton repeatedly secured the Tuesday-morning slot at national conferences for AIPAC and the Jewish Federations of North America, among others — a slot reserved for the most respected pro-Israel figure in Congress. Clinton chose the annual AIPAC conference in 2008 to concede the primaries to Obama.
For her 2016 bid, Clinton has lined up pro-Israel funding powerhouses who helped fuel her 2008 bid, including entertainment mogul Haim Saban, and has added some of Obama’s most prominent Jewish bundlers, notably movie executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. Lewis, the former White House communications chief, leads her Jewish outreach.
There were other alliances, less noticeable back in the 1990s, that would be personally consequential.
The 1992 election swept 51 Jewish lawmakers into Congress, the largest class ever. Among them was Rep. Marjorie Margolies, the Democrat from Pennsylvania who served a single term before being ousted in the Republican takeover of the House in ’94. Her opponents raised the issue of Margolies’ tie-breaking vote in 1993 passing Bill Clinton’s unpopular tax bill.
The Clintons, known for their loyalty to those who fall on their sword for them, campaigned for Margolies in her unsuccessful 2014 congressional bid. Margolies’ son, Marc Mezvinsky, met the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, when they were children at a political retreat, and fell in love when they met again at Stanford University. Co-officiating at their wedding was Rabbi James Ponet, the head rabbi at Yale.
After meetying up again with Hillary Clinton at a recent memorial for philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, Ponet said Clinton spoke with sensitivity about Bronfman’s efforts to make Swiss banks accountable for Holocaust-era Jewish assets. “There’s a sense of foundational connection to the Jewish people,” he said of her, “and a sense of the responsibility to the Jewish people in the world.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Israel Day Parade in New York in 2000 photo/jta-newsmakers-getty images-chris hondros